JAY SULLIVAN - ARCHITECTURES OF THE BODY - Spring - Summer 2021

ALLEGORY’S REACH, Essay by David Searcy

Jay Sullivan installation of works: *Bulbous, Death Pot, Bench, Cabinet, Urn*

ALLEGORY’S REACH

Jay Sullivan’s Architectures of the Body

Anteroom Corsicana | Spring – Summer 2021

Essay by David Searcy

Though Jay Sullivan ﬁnds immediate inspiration in 4th century Korean funerary customs, the essentials are more ancient and extensive.

All over Central Europe there are “urnﬁelds.” Cemeteries left by Bronze Age folk who burned their dead and buried them in pots. Pretty nice clay pots. The kinds of pots you store things in - like grain or wine. This appeals in ways that other methods of disposal don’t. You ﬁgure what a pot contains will someday be recovered.

Sullivan’s current installation, “Architectures of the Body,” in the Anteroom of the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, takes advantage of that tiny space to bring ideas of space and death and body into volatile compression. In this little room whole urn ﬁelds are implied. The sound of wind.

Right oﬀ the bat it’s very beautiful. Not just in that perfected (and so frequently aﬀected) sort of startlement that installations always seem to go for. But in the sense of beautiful as meaningful before the meaning’s known. One wants to know what this great, gray, cast - what? Aluminum? No, iron. It’s actually iron. It rings like iron. - what this great cast iron bell-like vessel on its side on the polished concrete ﬂoor can mean. It seems to mean that one might enter. Or at least imagine entering - that receptive opening ﬂared with rounded lip. A child would waste no time at all. And something about the subtly anthropomorphic fullness of the shape - Claudette Colbert rolled up in a carpet. It receives us in some way. Jay calls it “Death Pot.” And I’m thinking of the urnﬁelds. And admiring how it’s made, the madeness of it - grainy surface with the casting lines revealing how such things - such heavy philosophical things -tend to assemble rather awkwardly. I recall a cast iron, not quite life-size, seated, meditating Chinese monk. From the ﬁfteenth century, I think. In the Crow Collection. Having lost its gessoed and painted overburden, it revealed its core - the patched-together sections, the essential stiﬀness, awkwardness - how holiness and wisdom, I suppose, must be assembled.

And then, oﬀering a seat a little away, a yellow-painted wooden bench. A simple, thinly-painted L-shaped wooden bench. This, too, is beautiful. As clear as it can be, a brilliant, simple place to sit (and you’re invited to) to think about these heavy, gray ideas. The other heavy, gray idea across the room, called “Urn,” cast iron as well, presents a sort of dissection, or truncation, of the ﬁrst, the fuller emptiness. It’s vertical and maybe half the nearly half-ton weight of the larger piece. And yet so lightly balanced - rounded base received by a small steel ring - as to make the cast iron mass seem questionable. In support of which impression is the way the exterior surface ends abruptly at the truncation where the lip is cut straight oﬀ. There’s not that gentle continuity with the outside rolling over to invite you into the dark. The outside surface even oxidized to compromise it slightly, separate it and insist upon its thinness, and, I want to say, suggest a certain thinness to the mass itself, the whole idea of mass. Which even physicists admit can be elusive. All of which, I know, seems way too heavy a philosophical load to place on what are, after all, these very simple and industrial-looking objects. It’s the inﬂection, though, the adjustment to that heavy ordinariness - the slight reformulation of the stuﬀ we thought we knew - that truly startles. And permits - when you bring such startlements, as here, into a critical proximity - a critical discussion. In this case of nothing less than absence, presence, and the body. The uncertainty involved. It’s hard to know, just looking at the rolled-up carpet, if Claudette is really in there.

On the wall behind the Death Pot hangs a reference, I would say. Like what you’d ﬁnd in the appendix of some arcane mathematical book of theoretical surfaces, topologies. It’s an etching on some sort of very thin and wrinkly paper that resembles thinnest vellum or the tissue of a napkin and suggests provisionality. A contour map. Like the geographical kind, but more confused - of two interiors. One facing up, one down, like shells or cupped palms, meeting along a horizontal line compressed into what seems a sort of interference pattern. These interiors seem imponderable. The contour lines want rigor but they overlap in ways they probably shouldn’t, can’t quite seem to ﬁnd a system. Yet they’re beautiful.

Across the room, another reference. This more like the physical kind you ﬁnd in classrooms, public institutions to provide essential samples of materials under study. It’s a white wall-mounted cabinet with six drawers (ﬂoored in steel as dark as night) containing stuﬀ. You think of stuﬀ - well this is stuﬀ. Essential stuﬀ. As might emerge from children’s pockets. Nothing cute. But honest-to-goodness stuﬀ of which, I dare to suggest, ideas are made. On top of the cabinet there is stuﬀ as well. Along with sculptural objects found or made, including one small mounted human torso made of straw and wire and plaster - barely recognizable, so uncertain of itself, of self in general as I understand the earlier body of work to which it belongs. But in the drawers (you’re allowed to look and even touch) you’ve got your rocks of various sizes; lumps of wood and lumps of metal; beautifully colored balls of string; a cotton-stuﬀed and sewn-together unidentiﬁable form; an empty ceramic shell that must have inspired the contour map; a ﬁst-size, very heavy-looking metal polyhedron that, when lifted, truly startles with its weightlessness - just sheet brass soldered (messily but beautifully) together - and which speaks, as an empty massiveness, to the Death Pot’s massive emptiness; a rusty but unopened small tin can; another massive-looking, weightless polyhedron; larger colored balls of string; a slender stone of marvelous hue. It’s like a periodic table of the mind. The elements waiting to combine into some larger understanding.

And, again, it’s so important, this small space where the viewer gets to sit and join it. Where, it seems to me, the viewer on the bench completes a picture very like that one by Durer - his so famously mysterious engraving, “Melancholia 1,” where the gloomy, seated angel appears to gaze beyond the marvelous allegorical-seeming objects staged about her (great, mysterious polyhedron there among them) into some dark understanding outside allegory’s reach.

These works are part of a longstanding philosophical/sculptural investigation into how we form our bodily sense—what it is to be a body--through interactions with things and spaces that shape our experience. Vessels, furniture, things that present themselves to the hand are just some of these “architectures of the body”, intimate spaces of reflection, social commerce, and tactile inspection. A bench that derives from the market furniture of Momostenango, in Guatemala. A simple cabinet of collected remains, things that have come to hand over years of walking and making. The Death Pot and Urn, forms based in 4th century Korean funerary containers and meant to contain the powerful forces and substance of death and loss.

Such forms and practices are defined not only by our own bodies and the restrictions of architecture but by the presence and absence of others. We assume presence; the revelation of loss is often of how our body lives in the world through others, through openings and closures, and the contentment they afford through our daily practice with others.

-Jay Sullivan